Survivors Of The Holocaust In Ukraine Fear Putin Will Target Them Just Like Nazis

The only reason Yuri Parfenov was not murdered in the 1941 massacre of Odesa’s Jewish population is because a family hid him and his brother in a toilet pit when the soldiers came for them. The son of a Jewish mother and a Russian father, Mr Parfenov says he was due to be taken to the neighbouring region of Mykolaiv and shot that day.

- Bel Trew

In total, 14 members of his family – including his mother – were killed during the Holocaust in Ukraine. In the Black Sea port city of Odesa, tens of thousands of Jewish residents were shot, burned alive, and worked or starved to death – predominantly by Romanian soldiers allied with Nazi Germany. But Yuri survived, and later went on to serve in the army of the Soviet Union.

And so, he says, it is particularly ironic that as a half-Russian Holocaust survivor and former USSR tank captain, he faces death again, but this time at the hands of Vladimir Putin, who claims his invasion is intended to “denazify” the country and save the Russian-speaking inhabitants of Ukraine from “genocide”.

“Tell Putin: who are you liberating us from?” Yuri says in Russian – his native tongue – while shaking with rage. “I have no words; he is a monster. We didn’t ask for anyone to invade our land, to ‘liberate’ us, to kill our children. I want to tell Putin face to face, ‘You are a murderer.’ I cannot believe I have lived to see a war which could evolve into World War Three.”

Yuri is one of dozens of Holocaust survivors living in Odesa, which has a large Russian-speaking community and is steeped in a rich but painful Jewish history going back to its founding by Catherine the Great in 1794.